Thread by @gosokkyu

"I've already outlined the connection between these two games in my books, but I'd like to cover it again here, too: Shigeki Toyama, the designer who helped solidify Xevious after many dead ends, & Kikikaikai's original planner, Hisaya Yabusaki, were sempai/kohai in highschool"🇯🇵

"Taito had the Central R&D Lab ('ChuKen') but in the hopes of hitting upon fresh ideas, an in-house contest was held to invite non-ChuKen employees to submit game plans; the first such game was Hiroaki Sato's Scramble Formation & the second was Kikikaikai"

"Just as Namco's Kazunori Sawano envisaged Xevious as 'vertical Scramble', Hisaya Yabusaki's plans for Kikikaikai were inspired by his beloved Xevious, but deliberately opposite—Xevious was an autoscroller, so Kikikaikai was designed with free-scrolling"

"Chack'n Pop, Rumber Lumber & other games were popular with arcade rats but weren't big sellers; it's no coincidence that Taito's mgmt felt action games with unique rules wouldn't be profitable, and that the two games greenlit via this initiative were STG"

"STG were the bedrock of the arcade & maintained a certain popularity via being games anyone could play without instructions. that said, any old thing wouldn't fly; initially, Kikikaikai was being designed with 360-degree scrolling, but that idea was nixed"

"Kikikaikai losing 360-degree scrolling can be attributed to the failure of Metal Soldier Isaac—Isaac I worked similarly but players were aimless during loc test, so the devs redid the game w hard boundaries to guide the player & released it as Isaac II"

(to clarify, by "360-degree scrolling" they mean arbitrary scrolling on both the horizontal & vertical axis

btw, for those who don't know, Metal Soldier Isaac II was released with that exact title, even though the original version never made it to market)

"Yabusaki didn't want to turn Kikikaikai into a one-way scrolling game, so he added hori & vert sections & maze-like, pseudo-3D terrain; overlapping 3D terrain wasn't possible in the AC ver. but the FC ver, for which he did the initial plan, used this idea"

"initially, the main chara was a monk & while there was a shrine maiden chara, she wasn't playable; when programmer Kazutomo Ishida floated the idea of making her the player-chara at a planning meeting, everyone concurred & the 'OG Maiden Shooter' was born"

"Kikikaikai's main character Saya-chan was modeled after Urusei Yatsura's Sakura, who was Cherry's niece, a shrine maiden & teacher @ Tomobiki High School. The name 'Saya' was chosen via survey during development & the '-chan' suffix is considered official"

"Kikikaikai consciously tried to do the complete opposite of Xevious but the influence is everywhere: for example, Bake-Uri attacking from the well is derived from Derota/Garu-Derota, & Sayo-chan's rod move seems like it was inspired by Xevious' backfire"

"Xevious and Kikikaikai are curiously connected; according to Shigeki Toyama, when Hisaya Yabusaki was interviewing for a job at Taito's old toy production company, Toyama stopped over at his apartment before work at Namco to review his portfolio"

if you want more info like this, Zek (the person whose tweets I'm quoting) has written several books on many classic game subjects, incl. several about & with Shigeki Toyama beep-shop.com/ec/products/li…
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his authoritative Kikikaikai book seems to be OOP www5f.biglobe.ne.jp/~zekzek/sample…
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